Out of Africa
Ecocriticism beyond Environmental Justice
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8099577 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sule Emmanuel Egya (0000-0003-1888-1822, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 66-73 |
| Publication date | 2020-10-06 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Ecozon European Journal of Literature Culture and Environment (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2171-9594 • E-ISSN: 2171-9594 |
| Publisher | Universidad de Alcala (PUBLISHER • ES) |
| DOI | 10.37536/ecozona.2020.11.2.3495 |
| OpenAlex | W3094924193 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
This essay is an attempt to present a broader view of ecocriticism in Africa. Ecocriticism, in theory and practice, appears to have limited itself to the notion of environmental justice, with the aim of raising consciousness against institutional powers behind ecological crises. The reason for this is not far-fetched. International scholarship on African ecocriticism tends to focus on the activism of the Kenyan Wangari Mathai and the Nigerian Ken Saro-Wiwa; and on the fiction of a few writers concerned with environmentalism and conservation. This kind of ecocriticism, under the rubric of postcolonialism, is, in my view, narrow, too human-centred, and should, in fact, be decentred for an all-inclusive mapping of African ecocriticism. I attempt to shift this paradigm by foregrounding a narrative that stages the role and agency of nonhuman and spiritual materiality in practices that demonstrate nature-human relations since the pre-colonial period. I argue that for a proper delineation of the theory and practice of ecocriticism in Africa, attention should be paid to literary and cultural artefacts that depict Africa’s natural world in which humans sometimes find themselves helpless under the agency of other-than-human beings, with whom they negotiate the right path for the society. I conclude by making the point that a recognition of this natural world, and humans’ right place in it, is crucial to any ecocritical project that imagines an alternative to the present human-centred system. Keywords: African ecocriticism, natural worlds, spiritual materiality, nonhuman agency
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Ecocriticism · Environmental ethics · Environmental justice · Environmentalism · Foregrounding · Literature · Materiality (auditing · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Posthumanism · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction · Law · Philosophy
Africanfuturist Assemblages of the Undersea in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon
Love as Trope in Nigerian Ecocritical Discourse
Rethinking African Ecocriticism Beyond Regional Boundaries
The new performance space
The Feminization of the Land and the Naturalization of the Black Female Body
Humans as Waste
The Return of Nature
Inhabiting “the world we live from”
Decolonizing nature on screen
| Unique citing works | 9 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 9 |